Landis in the News 2004

“Managing this new architecture of opposition will take real dexterity and a new class of educated and worldly men at the top,” said Joshua Landis, assistant professor of history at the University of Oklahoma and author of the http://syriacomment.com weblog. “Kenaan may fit into this picture. Having been responsible for Lebanon for so many years, one can expect him to be much more sophisticated than the traditional mukhabarat men of the 1980s, who were quite brutal and focused on the Muslim Brotherhood.”

“For over a year, (Assad) has been asking Washington to coordinate on the Syrian-Iraqi border, but the U.S., believing it had the upper hand, refused,” writes Joshua Landis, a Syria specialist at the University of Oklahoma on his “Syria comment” Web site. “Now that the U.S. is getting sucked into the black hole of Baghdad, Washington is changing its tune and sucking up its pride. Syria knows that if it can have U.S. military officers and intelligence working hand-in-hand with Syrian security to coordinate border patrols and the like, it has opened a visible and potent avenue of dialogue. This is just what the neocons were trying to avoid.”

Joshua Landis, a Syria specialist at the University of Oklahoma, said: “I don’t think anything is going to stop the deterioration right now; Syria has dug in its heels and the US has set terms that the Syrians can’t possibly meet.”
“I think Syria is going to lose from this,” he said. “Syria has nothing to gain from driving this fight internationally and in Lebanon. “On the other hand, the regime has never been stronger domestically and has been able to make peace with a large array of domestic opponents,” Landis added.